Tough Love reduces Ware down to her essence, while offering ample opportunity for her to develop her technique.
Caribou’s Our Love is an uncharacteristically uneven effort from a generally consistent artist.
On Too Bright, Perfume Genius operates with far more flamboyance and panache, granting the album the feel of a second debut.
The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the Martín Rejtman film feeling incomplete.
With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.
Pascale Ferran’s film isn’t daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.
Ryan Adams is a dreary, spineless collection of half-baked songs that float by on the fumes of middle-aged wistfulness.
By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman’s patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.
This is the work of an artist who’s still intent on tearing things up, and understands how to shape interesting music out of the remnants.
Blacc Hollywood is remarkable only as a ghostly portrait of a half-formed figure prowling the fringes of success.
The push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.
While still fundamentally a hip-hop album, Lese Majesty sounds like few others.
The Voyager offers a balanced mixture of exhaustion and wisdom, but the album feels in need of more cohesion.
Anton Corbijn constructs a stifling world of shadowy surveillance and intersecting national interests.
Filmmaker Michel Gondry bungles his adaptation of the Boris Vian novel by indulging in homespun craftwork at the expense of plot and character detail.
The next step in Jafar Panahi’s personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.
It’s chaotic but ultimately focused, bound by an intense devotion to disassembling genre and narrative standards.
Animal Ambition finds 50 Cent in Charles Foster Kane mode, looking back fondly on the days of his youth.
Lazaretto is full of brash, forceful songs, further indulging the intense id formerly balanced by the White Stripes’ sweet-and-salty duality.
How to Dress Well’s What Is This Heart? is the sound of a one-man band at war with itself.